Top 3 Basic Chrome Extensions for Developers

Stefani Waddell
3 min readNov 3, 2020
Photo by Richy Great on Unsplash

As a software developer, Chrome extensions can be extremely helpful in your everyday adventures in coding. Here are my top three:

JSON Viewer
  1. JSON Viewer

I’m starting off with something that was a game changer the second I got it, and that every developer should be familiar with. JSON Viewer helps out when you’re working with RESTful APIs in your browser — essentially what it does is add white space to make all of that raw JSON data easier on the eyes. It’s the difference between trying to filter through a raw chunk of JSON data and something that looks like this:

https://github.com/tulios/json-viewer

Not only is the data much prettier to look at, but having an extension like JSON Viewer also makes it so much easier to look through your API and see if your data is being managed the way that it should be. Here’s the link for JSON Viewer.

Grepper

2. Grepper

I found out about Grepper from a friend I made at Flatiron, and I’m so glad that he shared it with me. As developers, we do a lot of Googling throughout the day. Grepper makes it easy to find the answers you’re looking for by grabbing code snippets that align with your search and displaying them at the top of your google results.

Grepper Search Results

I got the Grepper extension about a month ago and by far this has been one of the most helpful tools when I’m trying to find a quick answer to something basic or to find others’ solutions to bugs I’m running into in my code. This one comes highly recommended. Here’s the link for Grepper.

ColorZilla

3. ColorZilla

This one is pretty simple, but useful nonetheless. ColorZilla is an eyedropper tool that allows you to quickly grab the hex code and RGB value of a color in your browser. When it comes to styling and grabbing those codes quickly, this tool is your best friend. All you have to do is open up the extension, choose ‘Pick Color From Page’, and use the cursor to hover over the color you’d like to select.

ColorZilla Toolbar

My favorite part about ColorZilla is that when you find the color you want and click on it, the hex code is automatically copied to your clipboard so you don’t have to take the time to highlight and copy from the browser. There are a lot of other eyedropper tools in the Chrome Web Store but I prefer ColorZilla because it saves me the time of copying and pasting. Here’s the link for ColorZilla.

There are so many amazing Chrome extensions out there to help out developers, these are just a few of the ones that I use regularly and have made my life much easier when I’m coding. Hopefully this has been a helpful resource for some simple extensions to try out, and I’ll be keeping an eye out for more to share.

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